Pikachu #188 is still way below its ATH price but bottomed a little over two years ago in April 2024, after spending its first 3+ years steadily going down. It’s a top chase in Vivid Voltage.
Any opinions on whether this card is a buy right now or whether we should stay away?
In the 2003 Aquapolis set, Pokémon artist Kyoko Umemoto illustrated Gloom 49/147, showing Gloom asleep on a tree branch after using its own Sleep Sap attack.
Twenty years later, in Crown Zenith (2023), the same artist illustrated Gloom 002/159, showing Gloom falling from the tree branch. Still waiting on Umemoto to show what happens after the fall. Perhaps that will come in a future set.
The huge gap in time between these two cards might be the longest multi-card storyline gap in Pokémon history. Anyone know of a longer one?
Here’s mine. I put my top pulls on page one.
Only a few more days until the official release of Chaos Rising on May 22. If you want to see all the cards in the set, TCGplayer shows them all here: Chaos Rising
I attached to this post screenshots of my favorite ones.
What’s the one Chaos Rising card you are most looking forward to getting?
Bubble Mew, regarded by many as the SV era goat, just did a groundbreaking sale: almost a QUARTER of a million dollars, for a BGS black label 10.
Now that everyone is talking about bubble mew, I wanna explain something that I observed for a longer time:
The japanese version of this card is still, under current market conditions, undervalued.
First of all, I know its common knowledge, but some people dont know how INSANELY better the japanese card looks from an aesthetic standpoint, its just NEXT LEVEL.
The english version looks fake if you hold it side by side to the jpn OG version.
Now to talk a bit of maths:
mew ex JP 347 PSA 10 population: 24367 (~825 eur)
mew ex ENG 232 PSA 10 population: 15975 (~2504 eur)
Yes, the english PSA 10 population number is about 65% of the JPN PSA 10 population number, BUT the price is aprox. 3X higher.
Just looking at this alone, the jp version of Bubble Mew is still undervalued, not even judging by the fact that the english version has inferior print quality.
Now I know this card blew past alot of people's budgets, and I'm going to get some flame in the comments..
Just wanted to point this out before the general market notices.
Posted here last month about the scraper I was building so I could stop watching YouTubers and chasing deals. The pitch was simple: let the computer do the homework. Feel free to check it out: atlasdrake.ai/tcgboostoracle/
A lot of you weighed in, thanks. Some of the feature requests went straight into the roadmap.
Since then I shipped three more games:
Six things I learned along the way:
1. The pain isn't finding deals. It's the legwork before finding deals. Cross-referencing TCGplayer market price vs eBay sold vs PriceCharting vs Discord opinion is the real time sink. Removing the legwork is the value. The "deals" almost surface themselves once the legwork is done.
2. Forecasts get the clicks. Buy targets get the use. Turns out people don't want predictions about Q3 2027. They want to know if $54.99 is a fair price for a Booster Bundle right now. So I made the buy target the headline feature and the forecasts a deeper layer underneath.
3. Yu-Gi-Oh broke my chase-rarity model. The Pokemon ladder (Common to Special Illustration Rare) doesn't translate. Starlight Rare blew past anything Pokemon has, and Quarter Century Secret Rare landed at a tier I didn't have weights for. Built a new 0.5 to 3.5 table just for YGO. Pokemon-trained intuition is wrong here.
4. Pokemon Japan was the hardest crawl. Set codes, JP-only product types like "Premium Trainer Box" and "Special Card Set," regional variants. I spent more time on JustTCG name normalization than I did on the actual crawler logic.
5. The feature people don't ask for but use the most: storefront comparison. Once partner stores landed with promo codes and shipping/tax info baked in, retention jumped. People care about what they actually pay, not the listed price. Surfacing the real total before checkout is more useful than I expected. I crawl hundred of storefronts daily, surfacing best deals + analytics all on same page.
6. The price hunt extends beyond TCGplayer. Half the TCG investor workflow happens on Facebook Marketplace, eBay sold listings, and Google Shopping. Added one-click buttons for each, pre-filtered to the calculated buy target. Buy target on FB Marketplace means "show me only listings at or below fair value." Buy target on eBay Sold means "show me what flippers actually paid." Cross-platform price reasoning with the math already done ended up being one of the stickier features.
One example from this week:
TCGBoost Oracle flagged that Destined Rivals Booster Bundles were rapidly climbing in market price while some LGS listings still hadn’t updated yet.
I grabbed 5 bundles at $72 each.
Current market price is already around $85 👀
The biggest value honestly isn’t just “finding deals.” It’s identifying lag between market movement and storefront pricing updates before inventory disappears.
Instead of checking:
…the system surfaces:
📈 Momentum shifts
💸 Under market listings
📊 Historical pricing
🛒 Storefront lag opportunities
Still early, but it’s already saving me a ton of time.
Feel free to check it out: atlasdrake.ai/tcgboostoracle/
Magic and Lorcana are next on the roadmap. Curious what other signals you'd want me to build. I've been going by gut and what folks ask for, but happy to take direction.
The 20^(th) and 25^(th) anniversary years were both followed by cool-down periods in prices (2017/18 and 2022/23).
Will we get another post-anniversary pullback or is this time different?
I’m curious to get everyone’s thoughts on what will happen to prices, broadly speaking, across Pokémon in 2027/28. If you do think there will be a pullback, will it be a shallow cool-down like 2017/18 or a bigger correction like 2022/23?
I feel like an English version of this card would be really popular. Officially, it’s a Pikachu card but Gengar, Parasect, and Ekans are on it as well.
I’m thinking about getting one of these 2, which one is worth to invest?
I recently got these in a trade (not sequential) and was planning on using them in another trade for a higher value slab sometime soon, but I'm wondering if I should hold onto them a little longer.
I'm not really a fan of reprints, but I gotta say, the texture of these look really nice in person, and the stamp is cool, too.
After 5 years, Venusaur and Blastoise haven't broke $200, and Charizard hasn't broken $1000, so they might just keep creeping up slowly. But with the 30th anniversary set coming up, people might revisit these and there could be increased interest.
Probably my favorite card of all time.
May we not soon forget❤️
TCGplayer has the market price at $0.78.
Pokémon has some amazing Ho-Oh cards, so I’m not saying this is the best one ever. But compared to other Ho-Oh cards, this one being under $1 makes zero sense to me.
The picture doesn’t even do it justice. In person, it almost looks 3D.
I feel like this card should at least be in the $4 to $5 range.
Why is this card so cheap?
Prismatic Evolutions is right around the same age 151 was when it started to take off... will be exciting to see how Prismatic plays out over time.
(Please note that the chart uses an indexed price rather than the absolute dollar amounts of the regular ETBs. Using the indexed price produces a visually cleaner comparison. This means the Y-axis is not the dollar price of the ETBs. The starting point for the chart is the opening price for each set on the secondary market, not MSRP. By indexing, it allows the graph to show the same starting point (100) as opposed to using absolute dollar amounts, which wouldn't allow for the same starting point and therefore produce a more challenging direct comparison.)
Obviously not cool, but I’m sure they are just overwhelmed with submissions right now and trying to stop the flood slightly. From a business perspective I (mostly) get it since it takes time to ramp operations, but they probably should have been ahead of the curve a bit more.
My overall hunch is this will make the graded card market rally even more since the supply of graded cards will now be constrained. This is probably in PSA’s favor as well.
Anyone else have any tin foil hat thoughts?
A pretty cool duo I just learned about. These two cards were part of the All Nippon Airways Special ’01 Version campaign that took place during the summer of 2001. During the campaign, passengers who flew domestic ANA flights could redeem their boarding passes for a set of promos.
I have a few hundred singles from when I collected as a kid that I would like to consolidate into some higher value slabs. Market value is around $3k, but a majority of the cards are worth between $1-10. Almost everything is played (mostly MP-LP) and I've already taken out anything that's gradable or has sentimental value.
I would like to offload these since they take up a lot of both physical and mental space, and I want to do it in a timely manner while also maximizing what I can get for them, within reason.
My plan is to take them to a card show I'm going to soon and trade with vendors.
I was thinking I'd price them based on the value of the cards and do something like: $1-10 - take 60-70% $10-20 - take 80% $20+ - try for 85-90%
The only thing I'm worried about is conditioning. I'm used to selling on eBay where I feel like it's not as strict, but I definitely noticed last time that vendors were more scrutinizing than my standards (which of course lowers expected value).
I'm thinking whatever I don't move at the show I will try to trade with locally on FB Marketplace. And whatever is left from that I'll probably just throw up as a lot on eBay.
On a side note, after setting all of these aside I'm left with a decent amount of bulk from pretty much all eras going up to X&Y (with the exception of some bulk I've got from ripping stuff in recent years). It's all sorted and I'm wondering if I should try to get a certain rate for it. There's nothing worth over $1, but there's a lot of cards worth say 50c, and it ads up. Thinking about bringing it to the show and just seeing who might be interested, I had a guy last time I went who told me he was specifically interested in mid era bulk.
What do y'all think of my plan, am I being overoptimistic? Is there anything I'm missing?
Got the booster box and then the Prismatic bundle. Can’t believe they still have Surging Sparks booster boxes in them.